AES investments pay off in power sector

Written by Eugene N. Nforngwa

Friday, 08 January 2010 13:54

Aes DOUALA—Alucam, the aluminum smelting giant learned of more bad news last year. Acute power problems would force the company to scale down production for the second year running in 2010. The situation could persist until 2011, after a new deal with the government both reduced AES Sonel supply to the company and doubled the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity. For big power consumers like Alucam, energy woes will linger on for a while. But households and small consumers have never had a better time.

AES Sonel sister company, the Kribi Power Development Company (KPDC), has just commissioned a new 86 megawatts-capacity heavy fuel thermal plant in Yassa outside Douala. That brought the country’s electricity generation capacity up by 30 percent (300 megawatts) within five years, according to the officials. “An average of 55,000 new families are connected every year, and in the next ten years, we intend to double the number of families with access to reliable electricity,” says the AES president for Latin America and Africa regions, Andrew Vesey. “This will increase the number of Cameroonian households with access to electricity to 1,500,000 by 2010.”

Results being reported today are the outcome of huge investments. On arrival in the country in 2001, AES announced a CFA500 billion investment plan running up to this year. Other spending aside, close to CFA200 billion had been pumped into the country’s electricity system at the close of 2009. Of that, CFA150 billion went into stepping up generation capacity alone. By 2012, AES estimates that the volume of its overall commitments in Cameroon would reach CFA450 billion.

Cameroon power demand grows by some six to eight percent annually. To meet that, refurbishing works are also ongoing at the Edea, Songloulou and Lagdo dams, where generation capacity is expected to be stepped up from 269 megawatts currently to 284 megawatts by 2012. At Edea, over CFA75 billion is being spent to increase the lifespan of the 50-year-old facility.

Yassa brought the number of thermal plants AES either built or upgraded over the past eight years to six. And in the coming months, attention would be turned to the Kribi gas-fired plant, with an expected capacity of 216 megawatts. AES hopes that the project would be completed by the end of 2011.

The newly commissioned Yasa plant has about the same capacity as the Limbe heavy fuel plant commissioned in 2004. It lies on over seven hectares off the Yaounde highway exit from Douala, just before the Dibamba Bridge, and took 2500 people to build in two years. The plant is equipped with two 16.6 megawatts Wärtsila generators and can run from zero to full thrust in about 15 minutes.

Yassa operates mainly as a key backup to the main production plant in Edea, which serves the southern grid. It was built as a B plan after it became evident that the bigger Kribi gas fired plant would suffer delays, raising the possibilities of power rationing by the last year.

“Considering the additional 86 megawatts which will henceforth be injected into the Southern Interconnected Grid from [Yassa], we can confidently tell Cameroonian families from Douala to Bafoussam, Yaounde to Limbe, that the next dry season will be more pleasant that the previous ones,” said Vesey.

Yet, the thermal plants are only short-term measures to boost up Cameroon’s power supply, says energy and water resources minister Ngako Tomdio Michael. “Thermal plants are expensive to run but quick to build. A thermal plant [like Yasa] takes about eighteen months to go operational but if everything is set, a hydroelectric plant cannot take less than five years to complete.”

The government has plans to boost its hydroelectric power production. The objective is to triple energy production from 1,000 megawatts to 3000 megawatts by 2020 at the cost of some CFA6 trillion. In the meantime, big consumers like Alucam will have to wait to get all their power needs.